Standard survey questions for gauging job satisfaction [closed]

Question

Are there any standard surveys or questions that are useful for gauging software engineer or programmer job satisfaction? I hypothesize that determining software engineers' attitudes toward their jobs can reveal problems within an organization.

I'm thinking about questions such as the following:

• Are you reaching your full potential?
• Are you learning or improving skills that you could put on a resume?
• Are your skills valued within the company?
• Are your skills utilized?
• Is your voice heard?
• Do you have a mentor?
• Are you satisfied with your supervisor's leadership?
• Are you able to experiment and try new ideas?

Obviously the questions would need to be tweaked to get useful answers from a survey.

Answer 1

12 Questions to Measure Employee Engagement has some good questions for general job satisfaction that may be useful:

• Do you know what is expected of you at work?
• Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
• At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
• In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
• At work, do your opinions seem to count?
• Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
• Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
• Do you have a best friend at work?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
• In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The list is from Gallup's research and Marcus Buckingham if you want to dig deeper into the source.

Answer 2

The only question I really think that matters:

What would make you leave your current job?

If the bar is low (and money alone is a pretty low bar), then the subject isn't very satisfied.

There a lot of barriers to leaving, like family responsibilities, geographic location, skill set, preferred colleagues, general fear or inertia, etc. So any survey would really have to address (control for) those to be realistic. But I don't know how you could do that with a five-point scale.

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As an example, Zappos pays new employees to quit because anyone who takes The Offer isn't very committed to the company and it's good to know that up front.

Answer 3

Why not just ask "Are you happy with your current Job?"

Answer 4

I think your bullet points could describe almost any office job. Personally I think job satisfaction has a great deal to do with the company you work for, what you do in the IT field, and who you are. For example, I like the company I work for, the people I work with, the work I do is different almost daily, the lack of physical activity doesn't bother me, and I actually do see some output of the items I work on (sometimes not daily, but fairly frequently). Programming isn't for everyone, so if you think you would be happier elsewhere, I'd say go for it. But understand that your experience with one company does not represent the whole industry. You know in college many computer sciences students have written dissertation on job satisfaction and its importance’s.